The Aesthetic Is The Art Now.
Owning an aesthetic is owning influence is owning culture, and it's the future.
Culture is won through aesthetics, and authoring an iconic aesthetic—creating, coining, and embedding it in culture—may be one of the last defining acts of human creativity. Aesthetics shape everything, from creation and consumption to art, science, technology, business, & politics. And in a modern, increasingly AI-native world, the ‘aesthetic’ is the art—it is the unit of cultural currency and the infrastructure. (P.S. See the foonotes for my distinction between taste & aesthetics.)
Note: I wrote this essay before the now infamous ‘Studio Ghibli’ meme surge that took over Twitter / X on the heels of OpenAI announcing it’s latest model 4o’s image generation update. I’ve been pondering this topic ever since the web3 art wave and the emergence of generative AI tools for creativity. I write with conviction, yet it’s rare for such emphatic validation in such a short time—I’ll take it. I may write a short part 2.
